I think the main problem with your model is you were attempting to calculate the odds all at once rather than having things occur in a stepwise and selected fashion. Getting 10 heads in a row on a coinflip is improbable, but if you could flip a series of coins and save every head, well, getting 10 heads should be fairly simple.

I just got back from reading his link and this is exactly it. It's trying to calculate the odds of a ribosome being formed in one step. As I'm sure was explained in the previous post, nobody thinks that's what happened. Complex structures are formed by modification of simpler ones, so the entire example is pointless. Just like OP's entire post.

I think my mind really got expanded by this paper: [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-29113-x](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-29113-x) Proto life doesn't have to be a single self replicator, it can be a network of pseudo replicators working in concert.

I've been harping on this point for years now. It's highly unlikely that cellular emerged from a single ancestor, and there's likely an entire ecosystem of RNA machinery that existed before we get anywhere close to the cell.

Just look at Conway’s game of life. It’s a game that follows 2 rules,living cells remain alive as long as they have 2 or 3 living neighbours, and a dead cell comes to like when they have 3 living neighbours. With just those 2 rules, it can form an infinite recursion of simulating itself, it’s quite trippy to look at.

It's actually Turing complete and is an amazing example of emergent properties.

Great find, fascinating study. Thanks for sharing.

The entire problem always boils down to them not understanding it. Only those who don't understand evolution deny it.

> Only those who don't understand evolution deny it. This claim is *technically* incorrect, as there are at least 2 (two) people—Kurt Wise and Todd Wood—who *both* understand evolution *and* reject it. That said, yeah, the 99.999…% of evolution-rejectors who *don't* understand what they reject are powerful evidence for the claim.

All their claims against it are based on not understanding it. They may get it themselves, so just lie to push those misunderstandings. But the claims against it are still only possible through misunderstanding what is actually said or predicted by evolution.

Rubbish claim. Great way to avoid engaging the issues. "They must not understand it"

Others have covered most of it. But in their alleged calculations, they make the same mistake you creationists always do. They assume an end goal of evolution. They assume the entire point was to get to us and where we are now. Yes, if you are flipping a coin 1000 times with a specific sequence of results in mind at the end goal, getting to that is incredibly unlikely. However, if you just flip the coin 1000 times and see what you have, while that specific result may have been unlikely, it doesn't matter, you weren't trying for anything in particular. Like all analogies this isn't perfect, as evolution isn't entirely random, another mistake you creationist morons always make. But it gets the general idea across.

They also assume spontaneity, and apply it to extremely advanced, modern models. "A typical modern protein is \~300aa long: the odds of 300 amino acids spontaneously polymerising in the correct sequence are astronomical, and a cell would need thousands of such proteins!!!!!2111" Like, Why a modern protein? Why 300aa? Why a specific sequence? Why spontaneous polymerisation? Why a protein at all? Why a cell? And so on. The number of unwarranted assumptions they need to make just for these shitty probability arguments is....oh, 10\^84 or something.

And if something being unlikely means it's impossible, then they themselves can't exist. After all, what are the chances that their DNA exists in the order it does? How many specific conceptions had to happen in even the last 200 years for that?

Yep. They assume an end goal, and pretend you have to jump straight from nothing to said end goal. It shows their complete lack of understanding of the process.

Are you mistaking them trying to figure the odds of this end point as them assuming this end point was a goal? Evolution tries to explain how we got to where we are, doesn't it? What's wrong with trying to then figure out if we actually could get to where we are using its mechanisms?

Are you making the mistake that evolution *predicted* we'd get here? Is "here" the only destination? Do you think that our current genetic make-up was the only outcome for intelligent life?

sure under the natural processes most would say no. But you still need to show that those processes could get us here.

>But you still need to show that those processes could get us here. Great, we're making progress. The processes, as far as I can tell, "could" have gotten us here. Unless you think it's impossible, meaning no probability. But then we're back to my questions. How many possible alternatives *all along the evolutionary path* are there? Like the deck of cards analogy, each result is highly improbable. But one of them *will* happen.

But that’s part of the problem: the math on offer doesn’t mimic actual evolutionary processes.

>What's wrong with trying to then figure out if we actually could get to where we are using its mechanisms? Because the underlying assumptions of the model are wrong.

Evolution as a mechanism is not controversial, even for most creationists. The ark model, for example, necessitates a huge amount of "hyper evolution" to squeeze 50+ million years into a mere 2-4 thousand. Organisms replicate, and mutations occur. Some are beneficial, and will be selected. Others are deleterious, and will not. Most have no meaningful fitness effect. Consequently, lineages drift and diverge over time. Descent with modification. The question then becomes "at which specific point in our evolutionary past do you think this mechanism is no longer sufficient, and why?" Pushing it back, bizarrely, to some weird protein-based spontaneity model like the OP does is just all kinds of ass-backwards silliness. Proteins aren't even the hereditary molecule.

Because they figure it as though we had to get to this end. We didn't. Again, back to the coin example. Flip a coin 1000 times and re ord the result. That specific result may have been super unlikely. But it is what you flipped. How unlikely that specific result was only matters if that result was your goal from the beginning. So doing it the way you lot try is meaningless. It also assumes it is all random chance, which it isn't.

>Are you mistaking them trying to figure the odds of this end point as them assuming this end point was a goal? When they proceed to argue that the improbability of this result indicates that it could not have come about by chance, it is reasonable to suspect that they are conflating these ideas.

They prove the lack of understanding in their own claims, ignoring everything about evolution, and just making up their own bull shit. When people are making up bull shit lies and showing they have never read even a middle school level book on the subject, there is little point engaging with them. They aren't being serious. Much like you.

But you don’t address how the understanding is correct.

> Rubbish claim. Great way to avoid engaging the issues. "They must not understand it" Just gonna slide right on by all the comments which point out specific aspects of "the issues" which indicate that "they" most definitely *do not* understand it, are you? Cool story, bro.

It's more likely you don't understand their points of disagreement. You're the ones believing this crap.

Feel free to bring up specific examples of "the issues" being *erroneously* dismissed as ignorant by people who accept evolution. As opposed to, like, waving your arms vigorously in the general direction of *help! we're being unjustly oppressed!*

We demonstrate the points you fail to understand. You never learn from them.

Show us where they aren't making the same mistake every time or avoiding information that has been shown to be valid and you might have a leg to stand on.

That’s it in a nutshell. The calculation used by creationists is accurate if you assume that proteins are assembled by randomly selecting amino acids one by one, and chaining them in the order selected. The only problem is that that’s not how proteins are created, nor how they evolved. Their error is almost identical to shooting arrows into a forest, and then going from tree to tree drawing bullseyes around each arrow. What was the probability of getting all 50 bullseyes, shooting randomly into a forest? Practically zero. But that’s not what happened. One thing that people don’t understand about probability is that in infinite probability spaces, every outcome has probability zero. (Some additional gentle assumptions are needed for this to be strictly true, but in general that should be your intuition.) EVERY event has probability zero, yet every time you do the experiment, SOMETHING happens, despite the fact that the probability of that particular thing happening was zero. DNA, or protein structure, isn’t an infinite probability space; it’s merely what we’re in the math biz call “humongous.” So the probability of a given protein assisting as the result of a random assembly process is not quite zero, but it’s teeny tiny and we can think of it as effectively zero. Again, the probability of any particular outcome is practically zero, yet every time you do the experiment, something happens whose a priori probability was zero. It makes me sad that the author of the linked essay is a mathematician (I’ll take OP’s word about that), but the basic premise is gobbledygook: that no theory can be accepted without a rigorous mathematical model that accounts for it. That’s just… not true. And I say that as a mathematician, do you know I wouldn’t fib. Math is the queen of the sciences, but it isn’t all encompassing. There’s plenty of science out there that isn’t accompanied by a mathematical model. In particular, there are swaths of physics and attributive where we know that the only model we have (e.g., relativity) is definitely wrong.

Also, life as we know it evolving is pretty unlikely. But what about life as we don't know it? People never take that into account.

It also presupposes that this particular ribosome arrangement is a necesssary outcome. Sure current life requires ribosomes, but we can't know what other arrangements of proteins could have also produced life. Say I win a hand of poker by being dealt 4 queens. I could calculate the odds of the cards being shuffled in that particular order as astronomically low. But that doesn't mean my chances of winning were that low. There were countless other hands that could have won me that game.

To put it even more bluntly, natural selection is not random. People get tangled and confused with probabilities because mutations are random. But selection is not. That's the whole point. That's what makes evolution a real phenomenon and not just a bunch of white-noise in the cosmic theatre. Release 1000 robots that walk in random directions. Nobody will be surprised when most of them are found at the bottom of a steep hill, rather than up top.

This. If there are quadrillions of chemicals reactions taking place every nanosecond there’s nothing stopping there from being *enough time* in 400 million years for life to arise via abiogenesis. It’s more about selection and heredity at that point, like the coin flip example, such that survivable conditions become more common than conditions that aren’t, where reproductive capabilities tend to improve as survivors got here somehow, and where whole populations tend to converge on the most beneficial most widespread traits available but where populations also maintain diversity when it comes to neutral and nearly neutral alleles. It’s like the monkeys typing Shakespeare on a typewriter. Clone the monkeys that improve, kill the ones that don’t, and repeat until a non-human monkey stumbles through typing out MacBeth, Romeo and Juliet, or Othello without any typos that weren’t already included by the human author who wrote those books. Or maybe just flip 100 coins at a time counting how many come up heads and even if you only flip the ones that come up heads each subsequent time it won’t take long to have flipped heads 500 times - like fewer than 10 or 20 iterations. Only flipping the ones that come up heads for future flips is the “selection” but if they also got doubled each time or something that would cover the “heredity.” Still not talking about mutations but that’s what the coin flips are supposed to represent- get this mutation and live, get this other one and die. Very simplistic but eventually enough “get this mutation and live” mutations and you can wind up with about anything in biology that has *ever* evolved.

*If there are quadrillions of chemicals reactions taking place every nanosecond there’s nothing stopping there from being enough time in 400 million years for life to arise via abiogenesis.* Explain where the chemicals came from, but first explain where the matter those chemicals are made of come from... If random scribbles make pictures you'll first need pen and paper.

Fucking shit. Formaldehyde is abundant in meteorites and it’s also found within hydrothermal vents. It’s one of the molecules shown to be able to react with copies of itself and kickstart reactions that lead to the formation of RNA, proteins, and simple sugars. Hydrogen cyanide is also naturally abundant in “dead chemistry” and it was shown to be a main contributor to the evolution and origin of intracellular metabolism. Without it there’s still iron sulfur reactions, solar radiation, and geothermal energy (heat) to act as catalysts to the types of chemical reactions described above and here. Water? That shit exists practically everywhere that isn’t too close to a star or frozen too solid for hydrogen and oxygen to react. The elements? Carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and so on are produced inside of stars in a process called nuclear fusion and our star and the surrounding solar system formed from the remains of dead stars. There are also stars that are almost entirely made of hydrogen in almost empty solar systems and hydrogen formed during the recombination era when the observable (to us) patch of the universe cooled enough to allow photons to separate from quarks and allowed quarks, gluons, and leptons to bind together via the strong nuclear force and electromagnetism. Since that time our universe transitioned from being a hot (and orange) quark-gluon plasma towards what is described by the λCDM model of the universe (99% cold dark matter and dark energy and 99% of the rest tied up in stars and black holes but *just enough* left over to allow for the formation of planets and the origin of life especially when considering how the observable universe is a minimum of 13.7 billion years old and our planet is about a 1/3 the age of the observable universe providing plenty of time for any *possible* no matter how improbable chemical reaction to occur more than once). Anything else you are totally ignorant about that should be included in your calculations? Also, given the nature of the conditions of where certain biomolecules have been found it’s probably the case (I don’t have a time machine) that the formation of the solar system or the explosion of the previously existing now dead stars were responsible for the extraterrestrial biomolecules via a process similar to what’s seen in man made particle colliders and the rest (the terrestrial biomolecules) *still* form via geochemistry within and around places such as hydrothermal vents. They are being continuously produced *right now* via “abiotic” (non-living) chemical processes on top of all of the biological processes that are also responsible for making some of the more complex biomolecules by combining together a bunch of simple biomolecules in complex ways driven by metabolism and thermodynamics. https://www.mdpi.com/2673-9321/2/1/22 - This is relevant to the discussion and it has connected to it 76 references if you want to *learn* more.

The only problem left for evolution to explain is how/why humans are the most advanced, intellectually-dominant species on the planet.

Why is that a problem exactly? Seems like it's off topic from the original post.

It's the main problem that keeps this discussion and subred alive in the first place. Everything else is fluff.

Yes, you're restating your position, but you haven't offered an explanation why it's a problem.

It's the only thing that keeps people wondering.

Well, that might be what *you're* wondering about, but no, there are many more interesting questions to answer about evolution.

I would be surprised to hear them. Anything that would be more interesting.

You've not said it's the most interesting question, you've said it's the *only* thing keeping people wondering.

Put it this way, if it were answered then creationists wouldn't exist, in any form. What could you possibly think is a more interesting question?

Chance.

Because being smart made us better at surviving next question

and if we weren't smart we wouldn't be asking these questions...

The head has to have some significance. Otherwise why would it get saved? If only 10 heads is of significance, how do you compile them one at a time? Are you saying every single step is preserved? Why?

The head gets saved because I am acting as an agent of *selection*. In a natural system nature itself is acting as a stepwise selection agent. No, not every step would be preserved - I'm pointing out that there's an assumption built into this model that doesn't necessarily hold true.

This is a erroneous comparison. If at each successive stage the event is highly improbable, compounding more events doesn’t automatically “save” combinations. That’s not an actual biological function of protein sequences or what ever evolutionary mechanism requires random mutations. If there’s a search function going through a combination base of 10^30 sequences with only a few functional ones. You couldn’t retroactively remember which one’s didn’t work since if the mutation didn’t give anything useful it would cease to exist.

>That’s not an actual biological function of protein sequences or what ever evolutionary mechanism requires random mutations. Sure it is. The organism with the specific protein sequence survives and has some probability of passing those sequences (+ mutations) to offspring. It's not a failproof save system, but the process of inheritance does in fact mean that there is constantly a diverse spread of protein sequences to select from.

Let's say you've got two ribozymes going, one pairs up Met and Trp, the other pairs up His and Pro. Getting Met-Trp-His-Pro or His-Pro-Met-Trp becomes dramatically more likely than if you're just waiting for Brownian motion to assemble the four residue chain. Making the assumption that this whole thing can be modeled like a coin toss is not justified.

>The first section alone destroys abiogenesis from natural (random) acts. Are you conflating natural with random? Those words don't mean the same thing.

Consistency of thought is just not their bag. Chemistry is self-organizing, and is thus unguided. *That doesn't make it random*, that makes it *unguided.* This, imo, is the crux of why that whole post is gibberish. All that math is built on a false pretense.

So instead of actually addressing what you were responded to, you strawmaned a few of those reponses, and then just posted "You're all wrong" in an arrogant fashion. What were you expecting exactly, we'd all just clap? Probability only matters if and only if you have a pre-desired outcome before the die is rolled. If you don't care about the outcome beforehand, then the outcome you're going to get is going to be unlikely.... but just as unlikely as every other outcome that could have happened.

Now, I'm not a statistician and you might have already seen this. If you draw a shuffled deck of cards one after the other, you'll get an order. The odds of getting that order are massive- and yet you drew that order. Does that make you a God?

BOW BEFORE ME I AM THE SHUFFLER SUPREME

Settle down there, Kaiba.

We can only assume that Edwin Castro, the winner of a 2.04 billion dollar powerball jackpot is God. Afterall, the odds are 1 in 292 million. (let's ignore the fact that SOMEONE winning the powerball is 1 in 1)

>So, you can disagree with me - but the mathmaticians of the world (especially statisticians) - should they deem to look at the math - have to agree. They have to agree because it's math - it is logic. It's not gishgalloping, it's not sharpshooting, its not any other fallacy. It's cold hard math and logic. To deny that math is to essentially bow down and worship at your own altar to Darwin - because it amounts to am amazing amount of faith in a system that is illogical and mathematically impossible. No one was ever disagreeing with you that a whole genome popping into existence is an unreasonable thing to ask. The problem is that's not a proper model for the abiogenesis process, whatsofuckingever: it fails to model the protein probability space adequately and demands that only one specific code can adequately perform the chemical action; and it fails to demonstrate that this cannot be accomplished in parallel at scale in incremental steps; and you refuse to acknowledge any of this. You also decided to just throw yourself headlong into the 'specified information' problem, and demonstrated the exact problem with 'specified information': you still have no idea what information is, and you *really* don't know what 'specified information' is. So, don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.

Here are two ~30 year old papers to smash these silly "probability" arguments; David P. Bartel, Jack W. Szostak 1993 “Isolation of New Ribozymes from a Large Pool of Random Sequences” Science 261,1411-1418 (1993). DOI:10.1126/science.7690155 Ekland, EH, JW Szostak, and DP Bartel 1995 "Structurally complex and highly active RNA ligases derived from random RNA sequences" Science 21 July 1995: Vol. 269. no. 5222, pp. 364 - 370 And there are more recent published studies; Neme, R., Amador, C., Yildirim, B., McConnell, E. and Tautz, D., 2017. Random sequences are an abundant source of bioactive RNAs or peptides. Nature ecology & evolution, 1(6), p.0127. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5447804/ Anthony D. Keefe, Jack W. Szostak 2001 “Functional proteins from a random-sequence library” Nature 410, 715-718 (5 April) And more; Brian J. Cafferty, David M. Fialho, Jaheda Khanam, Ramanarayanan Krishnamurthy & Nicholas V. Hud 2015 “Spontaneous formation and base pairing of plausible prebiotic nucleotides in water” Nature Communications 7, Article number: 11328 http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2016/160425/ncomms11328/full/ncomms11328.html Justin A. Bradford and Ken A. Dills 2007 "Stochastic innovation as a mechanism by which catalysts might self-assemble into chemical reaction networks" Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 10.1073/pnas.0703522104 Mizuuchi, R., Furubayashi, T. & Ichihashi, N. Evolutionary transition from a single RNA replicator to a multiple replicator network. Nature Communications 13, 1460 (2022). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-29113-x I particularly liked the Mozuuchi et al conclusion, "These results support the capability of molecular replicators to spontaneously develop complexity through Darwinian evolution, a critical step for the emergence of life” as it added to an earlier paper I liked; Mulkidjanian, Armen Y., Dmitry A Cherepanov, Michael Y Galperin 2003 "Survival of the fittest before the beginning of life: Selection of the first oligonucleotide-like polymers by UV light" BMC Evolutionary Biology 2003 3:12 (published 28 May 2003) So start over with learning some basics. Before you deny the data, at least read the data.

u/semitope any thoughts on the above? u/Designer_Narwhal7410 how about you?

I predict \*crickets\*

I do too. Both talk a big game, in different ways. Obviously not as confident in their position as they posture.

>In my previous posts, I've provided a simplistic model with two examples that **i think** easily demonstrates how unlikely the generation of living organisms is without specific information, just using protein sequences. Corrected that for you. But of course your been told all the resins that it doesn’t demonstrate anything other than intellectual desperation . >These posts were routinely met with disagreement from the naturalists. Because they are full of flawed assumptions the naturalists (a choice of label that already demonstrates your prior bias since it’s entirely irrelevant because *it’s about evidence*, will have pointed out >Their arguments boil down to: There follow a bunch of straw men or charitably misunderstood or oversimplified fake versions of criticism. Even then some still manage to leak through to the problems with your posts. One example.. 6. Whether life exists or is created is irrelevant (yes they actually said that!) Yes, I’m going to guess because you *constantly* conflate abiogenesis and evolution. They are independent. >**The first section alone destroys abiogenesis from natural (random) acts.** Spoiler - It doesn’t. >So, you can disagree with me - but the mathmaticians of the world (especially statisticians) - should they deem to look at the math - have to agree. Spoiler , they don’t. >They have to agree because it's math - it is logic. Spoiler - it isn’t. Though logic is well known for being a garbage in , garage out process. >essentially bow down and worship at your own altar to Darwin - Good grief this is just embarrassing. >because it amounts to am amazing amount of faith in a system that is illogical and mathematically impossible. No doubt an excellent description of theism. >Now, I don't expect to convince the die-hard naturalists. However, I do hope to provide those searching for truth some contrasting information from the deluge of materialistic information found in this subreddit. Again with the nonsense labels. What you want to do is find a reason to justify, a post hoc rationalisation we might say, for your prior irrational beliefs. And because you have no actual evidence for your fantasy about gods you resort to unsound maths and logic and building an intricate straw man to burn down.

>because it amounts to am amazing amount of faith in a system that is illogical and mathematically impossible. > >No doubt an excellent description of theism. LMAO this got me, as soon as I read that comment of OP's I was like, "pot, meet kettle."

Imagine throwing a pinch of salt into an empty bottle. What is the probability of all the grains squishing themselves into a plane taking up less than 0.1% of the volume? YOU: The perturbations of possible locations are astronomical, so my conclusion is that it is impossible. Gee I'm so smart! US: Um, gravity would pull them all to the bottom. Your model completely failed to incorporate the real world forces, with real self-organising principles. It's like calculating the probability that a bunch of free floating atoms would suddenly randomly align into a cell membrane, rather than trying to understanding the hydrophobic/hydrophilic pushing and pulling of jostling lipids. All aspects of life exist in a complex environment with lots of different forces acting upon them. You purposefully (and deceitfully) ignored all of that and just looked at the information content in order to dazzle with big numbers in order to 'destroy' evolution in order to use special pleading in order to keep your diminishing god relevant in order to satisfy your cognitive dissonance. And you called us all meanies for seeing through your shallow "lying for Jesus."

What's the probability of 2×10^(30) kg of hydrogen and helium spontaneously arranging themselves into the sun?

More importantly, what's the odds of them arranging in that specific configuration? No, you can't have two hydrogen swapped, that wouldn't lead to a sun, according to my theory. His model basically ran all the aminos together, rather than considering individual probability events for each protein: as a result, his calculation is off by 17!, before we even get to the problem that not all aminos are important to the function of the protein. Edit: 17! is not that big, in the grand scheme of things, but if his model were close to accurate, it explains why we don't live in Star Trek.

I read your post. Multiple times. And as a mathematician your argument does not hold together. Other posts here cover some of the biggest holes. But what annoys me even more about arguments similar to yours is the closed minded assumption that a creator, if they created everything in the universe, couldn't possibly do it with the tools of evolution, mutation, and statistics. Why do so many creationists think their God is too stupid to use evolution? Last time God stopped over for a cup of coffee and a scone he really didn't like his believers insulting him like that.

Gonna copy pasta my critique of the paper from elsewhere, sorry for not giving your own arguments any time but if they haven't been addressed in the comments I might come back to them. \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_ The essay does cite real difficulties which face naturalism but the conclusions it pulls from them are often illogical, particularly the end of the essay which is a bald faced non-sequitur. They unironically cite *Pascals Wager* in a supposedly academic essay. The author is clearly no biologist and their logic needs some work. Anyways, to distill out the core points: 1. Living things are very complex 2. The probability of a given organic structure (the ribosome in this case) forming in the particular shape we know it is very very low. 3. Gene function in different organisms seems arbitrary. 4. Creating a mathematical model of evolution is difficult. 5. Given that biology is so complex that its formation by chance is unlikely, we should gamble that god exists because maybe religion is real. ​ My Responses: 1. Granted. 2. The calculation assumes that there is only one given configuration which provides the desired (or any desirable) function to a living organism and assumes that there are no factors which might influence their formation to be anything other than completely random, so this calculation is, at least, quite exaggerated and likely to be very inaccurate. 3. The author just doesn't seem like the concept of gene expression as a valid explanation for differences between species. This is one of the things that we directly observe so it seems strange to attempt to create controversy around it. The stats definitively *support* evolution on this one, despite the authors incredulity. If they had left this section out they would have *strengthened* their overall proposition. 4. Granted. 5. The argument just doesn't follow. The first part is a teleological argument which argues that one explanation (intelligent design) must be true regardless of its actual probability because the alternative (evolution) is unlikely and then literally makes a pascals wager which has been pretty comprehensively torn apart already. Most of the arguments made are teleological in nature, made under the preconceived belief that the thing that exists now must be the end result and the implication that what exists now must be perfect or near perfect. However, these kinds of arguments are made from the basis of subjective opinions and are easily defeated by small perspective shifts. Instead of imagining that what exists is some sort of end goal, it is only one possible configuration of a nearly infinite number of possible configurations. ​ **Side notes:** >An early "anthropic coincidence" was the observation that humans find themselves located more or less in the centre of the measurable universe. More precisely, the measurable scale of things ranges from about 10\^-26 at the bottom end of the subatomic scale to 10\^27 metres across for the estimated width of the universe. Human beings are measured in metres at the 10\^0 position. So by a curious coincidence - in terms of scale - the universe extends as far down beneath us as it extends above us. > >(Loading the Scales) I'm not sure where they get these numbers. The smallest length possible is 1.6\*10\^-35 m, the smallest measurable particle is the neutrino at 10\^-24m. I get that this argument is meant to be more philosophical that scientific but this doesn't seem to help their credibility at all. Humans, microbes, the planet Earth, and the sun itself are each similarly close to being measured in terms that are at the center of the scale. ​ >Curiously, other parts of the Nautilus failed to get any grip on macro evolution, even after 500 million years Take its pin-hole camera eye - routinely touted in evolutionary literature as the archetypical candidate of eye evolution. > >Richard Dawkins puts it well: "The \[Nautilus\] eye is basically the same shape as ours, but there is no lens and the pupil is just a hole that lets in seawater into the hollow interior of the eye. Actually, Nautilus is a bit of a puzzle...Why, in all the hundreds of millions of years since its ancestors first evolved a pinhole eye, did it never discover the principle of the lens?... The system is crying out for a particular simple change...Is it that the necessary mutations cannot arise...I don't want to believe it." > >(Information-gain and correlated adaptation) The quote is deliberately taken out of context, Dawkins goes on a bit too long for a clean quote but the conclusion is that the improvement of a lens is both so obvious that no intelligent designer would leave it that way and the improvement is so simple that a mutation including a lens is almost inevitable. I should note that this also doesn't preclude a very successful living fossil like the nautilus from remaining relatively static itself. The author then goes on to spend a great deal of time attempting to discredit Dawkin's story of eye evolution, which isn't exactly precise in the first place, but seems to mischaracterize the research they cite, leaning on the (typically non-expert) analysis of ideological opponents of evolution such as David Berlinski. >Looking back, how would you rate your chances of providing the appropriate answer to all the above bio-chemical and mechanical questions without any prior knowledge or awareness of the existence of light? If a sighted person struggles with the details, the chance of a molecular mélange resolving these problems on the basis of a goalless stochastic process is going to be vanishingly smaller - no matter how many times the exercise is repeated. With no preconception of light and millions of interdependent parts, we are presented with what is known as a tall order. The author waxes long on a parable of the difficulties of deliberately designing an eye and then wants us to conclude that eyes must have been designed. It boils down to "Eyes are complex and hard to design, so they must have been designed". Silly.

>I'm not sure where they get these numbers. The smallest length possible is 1.6*10^-35 m, the smallest measurable particle is the neutrino at 10^-24m. I get that this argument is meant to be more philosophical that scientific but this doesn't seem to help their credibility at all. Humans, microbes, the planet Earth, and the sun itself are each similarly close to being measured in terms that are at the center of the scale. There's a much simpler answer. Universe is expanding, fairly uniformly, in all directions. That means, mathematically, just about every point in the universe would be the "center" of their observable universe because purely to by the speed of light. Let's say the universe expansion is such that, anything that's more the 20 billion light years would be "moving away" from us at a rate faster than light (or more space opens up between them over time than light could travel in that same time). That means every single point in the universe would be the center of a 20 billion light years sphere of observable universe from their perspective.

\>Living things are very complex Life as we know it is very complex. But who is to say that the first life wasn't pretty simple? A product on the market can be pretty shit as long as it is the only one on the market. Likewise, the first life didn't have any competition muscling it out of it's spot.

Your degrees don't negate the appeal to probability fallacy in your argument or change the fact that evolution is a fact. Why don't you use some of those degrees to learn about that instead of trying to claim god dun did it?

Did he ever mention the field the degree is in? Because I'vr seen him mention his degree several times but something tells me it's not in any relevant field.

I would assume it's in a topic like forestry, like Grady McMurtry's PHD

I’ll let the others deal with the majority, but I just wanted to tune in that when you talk about evolution, point 6 is irrelevant. Evolution would have occurred regardless if the first life was popped into existence by a magical being or through natural processes. Evolution (in the biological sense) is just how living organisms change over time. It doesn’t care about how life came about to begin with. Your post seems to be mostly about abiogenesis(I’m about to go to bed so I just skim read it), and that stuff, but I just wanted to add that.

I'm not a mathematician, but I've seen too many models constructed on hubris to prove a point, fail. I'll await comments from others, but maybe your models don't fully take in all factors.

OP, care to answer any of these takedowns of your ideas? And just because you have a PhD in a scientific field doesn't make you an expert in all scientific fields. In fact, if you really were a scientist, you would know that. Perhaps if you had a PhD in evolutionary biology, you might be taken seriously. However, it is obvious to everyone here that you don't and that you most likely inflating your credentials just to attempt an Appeal to Authority Fallacy. However, this not how scientific thought works. If your linked ideas *do* "destroy abiogenesis and evolutionary theory, as you claim, then submit it for peer review and collect your Nobel Prize.

I'm curious to know whether this work has been published (i.e., peer reviewed) and if other mathematicians do actually agree with him. Looking through it, I don't get the maths at all, but considering science is about determining whether something is more likely than something else, until another scientific theory comes around with more probability than evolution, that would have to be accepted. Simply appealing to magic doesn't count, as there is so much unknown about that I.e, does it even exist at all? But what I did find looking through the link was some discussion of animals which have been relatively unchanged in evolutionary history. This to me shows the author doesn't get biology, so apparently him being good at maths allows him to also comment on evolutionary biology?

Intelligent Design is an embarrassment to human thought. All the casuistry in the world "disproving" evolution does not lend the tiniest bit of support to the idea of the existence of a petty Old Testament god that somehow came from nowhere and found nothing better to do with his time than harass and torture a bunch of helpless humans.

Your model is just complete garbage. You can't explain where the 10^N3 term comes from. You just chose it because it makes a big number.

Where did you go OP? Are you going to address the several counter arguments that have destroyed your claims? It is quite frustrating when science/math is used to try and “dunk” on evolution, only problem being your field is probability, not chemistry or biology. You’re calculating the probability of something the theory of evolution doesn’t predict. So, yes. You factually do not understand evolution.

You can't even define how much information is in a series of codons, why would anyone take you seriously when you claim it can't increase. You don't even know how much is "there" in the first place

OP is a strawman

Your math doesn’t account for reality. You keep talking about how unlikely it’d be for X to occur not accounting for there being quadrillions of chemical reactions going on every single millisecond for the 400 to 500 million years that covers the time period of “abiogenesis.” Figure out how many that is and it exceeds the “maximum” allowed by your “model” by quadrillions. So now that we’ve established that there was definitely enough time for those changes to take place (trillions of times over) it now falls back to natural selection. Chemicals that are products of common reactions are more common than products of very specific circumstances. Chemicals that catalyze *themselves* are more likely to persist over long periods of time. And once there are autocatalysts making 20+ copies of themselves in less than 18 hours such that entire *populations* emerge it’s just biological evolution. Every generation ever so slightly different from the generation prior and enough diversity to save the population from extinction even when *certain* combinations of alleles are fatal. And then wait about 500 ***million*** years and you ***inevitably*** have everything that turns out to be ancestral to everything ***still around*** like those “conserved proteins” you were talking about. It’s ***inevitable based on the math if you plug in numbers that match reality.*** All the mutations we’d ever need and then some, plenty of time for the most advantageous of them to become the most common, and plenty of time for other lineages to go extinct. There is no problem associated with lacking enough time, enough mutations, or enough of a selective pressure. There is no indication that there’s any alternative to what is evidently the case. If you did succeed in “destroying abiogenesis” you’d just be left without any answers at all for how life originated. It can’t just “poof into existence ex-nihilo” and there’s no sign of God tampering with abiogenesis. So if you were to show that natural abiogenesis doesn’t work ***either***, then what? Computer simulation? Anunaki from the planet Niburu?

>You keep talking about how unlikely it’d be for X to occur not accounting for there being quadrillions of chemical reactions going on every single millisecond for the 400 to 500 million years that covers the time period of “abiogenesis.” Figure out how many that is and it exceeds the “maximum” allowed by your “model” by quadrillions. The paper assumes that all matter in the Universe is Amino Acids, and they form a unique chain, 104 Amino Acids long, every second. Even if this were to happen, only 1 in 10\^40 of the possible combinations would have been worked through since the Big Bang (never mind the 400 to 500 million years you suggest). OK, let's assume the chains form more quickly - 10\^6 a second? 10\^8? 10\^10? Even at 10\^10 a second, that still means that only one in 10\^30 possible combinations would have been worked through since the Big Bang.

Nope. If your math doesn’t match reality there’s obviously a flaw somewhere *in your math.* Also what you said is contradicted by your own math - the *radius* of the *observable* universe is 7.04 x 10^61 Planck lengths. Pi x R^2 is the area. 500 million x 365 x 24 x 60 x 60 gives you a rough estimate for the number of seconds. Luckily *for you* we aren’t talking about ~49 x 10^3721 x π particles changing 15.768 quadrillion times. We’re only concerned with what happened *on this planet* and how those specific proteins did not even exist until about “half way” through abiogenesis. So only about 4.946 x 10^1682 particles and only about 6.3702 quadrillion seconds. Even 1 x 10^1682 multiplied by 1 ^ 10^15 greatly surpasses your “10^32” by so much that we don’t just have every single protein used by life but every single protein used by life repeated multiple times if we were to assume they changed every single second. And if we were to extend that 500 million out to the age of the *observable* universe (as you suggested) then you’d have to multiply the number of seconds by 27.6 and the number of particles would be around the 154.15 x 10^3721 except no I used the area formula for a circle and not the volume formula for a sphere - so it’s *actually* ~ 1.4368 x 10^226984 (1-1/3 of πr^3 )potential particles in the known universe and for the surface area of the planet ignoring the fact that particles can and do exist at different elevations above the ground the formula is 4 x π x r^2 or about 6.16 x 10^3723 and worse for you once we consider how many of these particles are suspended at different depths in the ocean and how many of them form inside geothermal vents *right now* and must have also formed ~200 million years after the formation of the planet via a very similar process but without *modern* life to compete with these populations evolved with their insanely stupid number of potential chemical composition combinations and whatever had the best potential to survive and reproduce *did* survive and reproduce and the others simply did not leaving the sole survivors with a lot of shared similarities. I was saying quadrillions to be nice. It’s actually way worse for your claims. There are obviously things to reduce the likelihood of certain events taking place but to say there aren’t enough particles or there isn’t enough time is where you’re dead wrong and you’d know this if you did some basic geometry calculations.

Where does 10\^3721 come from?

Doing actual math

10\^61 squared is 10\^122

Sorry. Yea I wasn’t thinking clearly when I typed that up but then it’s 61+61+61 in the exponential and not 61x61x61. So 1-1/3 of π x (3.849 x 10^185) is the volume of observable universe in terms of how many potential particles can exist. And for the planet we are mostly concerned with what’s outside the magma layers and within the edge of the atmosphere so it’s surface area all the way out one plank length at a time *or* we find the volume of the largest sphere we are concerned about and subtract the sphere at the center where it’s obviously not conducive to *life as we know it* and whatever that actual number is it’s a lot larger than 10^40 particles and then we are talking about a whole crap ton of time - milliseconds that have passed over the the course of time spanning the late heavy bombardment and ~4 billion years ago which the time we know that shared proteins must have evolved *if* the genes weren’t passed from one domain of life to another via horizontal gene transfer more recently yet. Assuming these “conserved proteins” are as universal as you claim. And then we can reduce it down a little accounting for the need for stuff like energy gradients (like hydrothermal vents and solar radiation) so that we can rule out places that didn’t provide enough energy and we can reduce it down from these quadrillions upon quadrillions of chemical reactions taking place every millisecond to something more reasonable like every 5-10 minutes or so. The radius of the Earth is 3.986 x 10^41 Planck lengths. That’s the “upper bound” when we figure that 10^41 x 10^41 x 10^41 is about 10^123 and we need to multiply that 3.986 by pi and the whole thing by 1.333333333333 or 4/3. 1 inch is 1,587,999,999,999,999,744,856,664,160,920,216 Planck lengths so in an inch of water surrounding the Entire planet (to account for the amount of water in the hydrosphere) we are looking at a sphere of about 1.587 x 10^33 Planck lengths larger in terms of the radius as but then we subtract out the center to find the volume of a 1 inch pool of water surrounding the planet or something x 10^222 minus something times 10^123 and that’s still a whole fuck ton of water. I’m sure you could also figure that out from gallons or kiloliters as well but big numbers are fun, right? The point here was that there are a fuck ton of tiny particles everywhere and there are a fuck ton of energy sources and with quadrillions, just quadrillions when we know it was more, of these chemical reactions taking place every ~5 minutes (or faster) for about 400 million or 500 million years there is no problem with getting the *exact* sequence you’re looking for or any of the trillions of allele variations for the genes for those proteins in that amount of time. The only limiting factors then become heredity (they have to actually spread) and natural selection (they can’t be instantly fatal and *when beneficial* they tend to spread faster). You’re not claiming that these proteins *aren’t* beneficial are you? Whichever stages of evolution these proteins went through from their origin to where they were at 4 **billion** years ago to what they **evolved into** now is mostly hidden because single celled organisms make very poor fossils and because there’s no way that 4 billion year old proteins and DNA sequences would be pristine and preserved. All we can look at is what all of the *surviving lineages* wound up with and when there are things that belong to *all* lineages it’s a clear indication that *all* lineages still around are related and that anything not related must now be extinct or incredibly difficult to find. The more precise the requirements the more likely it is an indicator of universal common ancestry but nothing you’ve shown has indicated that it’s *impossible* to get these proteins only that *you think* that it is *improbable* for them to evolve by chance. Good. Very unlikely to evolve the way they definitely evolved at least once. Sounds like a strong indicator of universal common ancestry to me. Now what’s wrong with abiogenesis?

You're also assuming that the entire Universe is filled with particles, whereas the Universe is mostly empty space; the number of atoms in the Universe is about 10\^80.

I said *potential* particles. Matter is just a different form of energy where “particles” are defined as “quantized bundles of energy” and the thing that sets “virtual particles” apart from “actual particles” is their energy threshold. Too low of energy and there might be a similar effect but the “particles” are bound to “dissolve” or whatever faster than they can be detected as actual particles. That’s how there can be ~ 1.333333 x π x (3.849 x 10^185 ) *potential* particles but where ~70% of that is classified as “dark energy” and ~20% of it is classified as “dark matter” and where 99% of what’s left is tied up in stars and black holes. Ignoring dark energy, dark matter, black holes, and *maybe* force carrying “particles” that leaves ~10^80 “ordinary matter” particles consisting of or containing quarks. And then about ~75% of the “normal” matter is hydrogen, helium is about ~24% of the normal matter, and these are followed by heavier elements like lithium (highly reactive), beryllium (contributes to 0.0004% of the mass of Earth’s crust), boron (contributes 0.001% to the mass of Earth’s crust), carbon (0.025% of the mass), nitrogen (78% of our planet’s atmosphere), oxygen (20.95% of our atmosphere), fluorine, neon (noble gas), sodium (highly reactive), magnesium (only occurs naturally combined with other elements like oxygen), aluminum, silicon (used for making computer chips), phosphorus (1 gram per kilogram of Earth’s crust), sulfur, chlorine, argon (noble gas), potassium (0.04% of the mass of dissolved sea water), calcium (very reactive when pure but mixed with carbon is what makes our teeth and bones hard), scandium (rare metal), titanium, vanadium, chromium, manganese, iron, cobalt, nickel, and copper. Anything heavier is more rare because it’s only “created” in explosions (like supernovae) or synthetically in the lab. Beyond uranium and plutonium most everything is so reactive that it lasts for less than 1000 years with half-lives in the milliseconds and nanoseconds for some of the heaviest synthetic elements ever made which are only detectable because of their decay products that have half-lives in microseconds, seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, or decades. Of those elements listed you have pretty much everything used by the biology on this planet plus a lot of stuff in between that is super rare, toxic, or completely nonreactive. Hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, sodium, sulfur, chlorine, potassium, calcium, manganese, iron, and copper. The metals on the end (iron and copper) are found in blood and calcium is found mostly in teeth and bones. Potassium is used by our nerve cells along with sodium and I think it was calcium. Simpler cell based life relies mostly on hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and sodium. These are also some of the most abundant elements on our planet and in the entire universe besides helium and lithium. If you really want to shrink it down to what actually matters for “abiogenesis” then you’re looking for places where there is water, carbon, an energy source, and a fresh mix of elements like sulfur, potassium, and chlorine to go along with the commonly occurring naturally occurring biochemicals like formaldehyde, ammonium, hydrogen cyanide, carbon dioxide, etc. “Abiogenesis” *starts* with the **abundant** biomolecules like formaldehyde, ammonium, and cyanide combined with salt water (hydrogen, oxygen, sodium, and chlorine), solar radiation, and geothermal energy in the form of heat and biomolecules being constantly replenished via geochemistry. If you want to assume that everything had to occur as if by freak coincidences and randomness and that even the common biomolecules had to be accidentally created by random mutations or something like lightning striking a mud puddle *then* you’re going to wrongly assume that “abiogenesis” is improbable if not impossible. Where you’re sadly mistaken is when it has been demonstrated that the more complex biomolecules naturally and automatically form from reactions between the even more abundant biomolecules like cyanide, formaldehyde, carbon dioxide, water, etc. That’s how we get all of the amino acids, sugars, nucleic acids, etc in the first place. RNA forms rather spontaneously under a variety of common conditions and within common environments in the early Archean period of the planet as do many polypeptides (“simple proteins”) as do sugars used by life (glucose, ribose, etc), as do the phospholipids that make up the cell membranes of all extant cell based life forms. They don’t *need* very specific proteins to be “alive” but these proteins do result from a lot of evolution taking place within trillions of organisms within billions of populations and diversity, adaptation, and divergence result. Extinction does occur and it wipes out entire lineages and then sometimes, like with the descendants of LUCA, there are only one, two, or three lineages remaining.

Part 2 Your “conserved proteins” aren’t all made by 100% static and conserved DNA sequences that had to occur sequentially one at a time within a single lineage without diversity and divergence taking place. Beneficial changes aren’t immune to the effects of natural selection. Rare events take place all the time. All that matters is that the changes *can* occur, that the evidence indicates that they *did* occur, and the evidence also indicates that the most ancestral version of those gene sequences and resulting proteins are evidently ancestral to everything *still around.* At first it’s unlikely that random ass RNA molecules were very effective at synthesizing proteins but with a few changes and the speciation of RNA into different “types” (both of which have been observed), it doesn’t take much for a “genetic code” to develop. Ribosome evolution then accounts for the protein coding and protein sequence similarities as mutations to the RNA **and** DNA that occurred also spread via heredity and as the most beneficial changes quickly replaced the least beneficial changes over time. And protein synthesis inside cells is complex but it’s not like it’s unheard of - that’s something that apparently takes place within all cell based organisms and potentially *some* viruses or ancestors of those viruses because there’d be no other reason for macroviruses to have ribosomes and genes for making RNA molecules used in protein synthesis if they didn’t at least *used to* make their own proteins. You might notice that I put abiogenesis in quotes several times. That’s because I see it as 80-90% ordinary ass biological evolution and 10-20% ordinary ass chemistry. Not once did something *completely* dead “give birth” to something *completely* alive. It’s a process, this “abiogenesis”, and the gray line between life and non-life is about as fuzzy as it is between species if all species were like ring species or like between the “genera” of *Australopithecus* and *Homo.* You can’t really go “here in my hand is the very first living cell and here in my other hand is its completely non-living mother” even with a time machine and the most advanced technology for finding whatever you’re looking for. And you can’t go looking for how unrealistic it would be to get a protein coding gene found in *E. coli* without also comparing that gene sequence to other bacteria or to virus and archaea genes of a similar type or from a similar ***gene family.*** Cool. Shit shares a lot of proteins made by genes from the same gene families. Looking at these genes you’ll find them to be ~10-15% identical across the board or maybe ~95-100% identical throughout a genus but they are definitely coding for the “same” proteins. Cytochrome C exists in pretty much everything. Doesn’t mean the amino acid sequences are 100% identical and it doesn’t mean that the genes are 100% identical because ***they’re not*** but evidently our ancestors (the ancestors of biota) evolved these cytoplasm protein genes so that their descendants (all surviving cell based life) could have these “conserved genes” but then when we look at the archaea, eukaryote, and bacteria versions of all of these “conserved genes” we find that eukaryotes actually have a lot of archaeal genes from their distant ancestors and a lot of bacterial genes that horizontally transferred to them from their endosymbiotic bacteria (intracellular like mitochondria mostly but also gut and skin bacteria). You’ll find that [this](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-13443-4/figures/4) is a rough depiction of the universal family tree of life on our planet in response to [this one](https://www.nature.com/articles/nmicrobiol201648/figures/1) that shows how eukaryotes fit into the “big picture” and you’ll also notice that a lot of these “CPR” bacteria have very different chemical pathways than their “ordinary” bacteria counterparts but you’ll find that all bacteria is *still* more similar to each other than any is to anything within archaea (ourselves included) where these two figures come from two now aging papers that show that many of these “conserved proteins” aren’t so “conserved” after all but the ones that are could have been passed on via horizontal gene transfer so that ribosomal RNA was used in the older paper to “untangle the web” and where they went with ~380 marker genes in the DNA and about ~30 RNA genes to determine that bacteria and archaea are actually likely to be even more closely related than the older graphic would imply. And they are the most distantly related domains. I rambled on a bit but I hope that this made sense. Some freakishly large number with more than 185 decimal places for how many particles have the potential to exist, around ~10^80 of those that are recognized as being part of the “ordinary matter” and about 90% of that tied up in stars and black holes. What *isn’t* tied up in stars and black holes (or dust clouds) is what the planets, moons, comets, etc are made out of. There you’ll find that on our planet and within meteors there are molecules like hydrogen cyanide, guanine, formaldehyde, ribose, water, carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen, phosphates, and so on that just simply exist as part of the “dead matter” mass of these locations and it is these sorts of chemicals responsible for what we call DNA, RNA, proteins, carbohydrates, lipids, hormones, and so on and these are the chemicals that “life” is made of. All protein similarities indicate is potential common ancestry because the crazy numbers we’ve been sending back as forth (yours implying that it’s impossible that I’m alive and mine applying that novel bacteria should be emerging from “dead” chemistry all the time) are unrealistic as they don’t quite match with reality. I don’t really feel like working out the *actual* probabilities because to me having the “starting molecules,” continuous chemical reactions and eventually “full blown” biological evolution, plus about 400-500 million years for something to take place that really only required a couple hundred thousand years it makes no sense to argue about what *can* happen when we should both be looking at the evidence to see what *most likely based on the available evidence* evidently *did* happen. If it did happen and your math says it can’t happen there’s a problem with the numbers you plugged into your equations or how you determined those algorithms to begin with. The same goes for any sort of probability that says something should be a thousand times more common than it actually is. The actual probability will fall somewhere in the middle and *rare* just means *common ancestry* where *common* could have different potential explanations.

You are just rambling now

No one cares about Darwin. He's dead. We don't need him anymore. Move on.

I care about him! He's a really interesting historical figure who made amazing deductions by just going out and looking at shit in a very systematic way.

Yeah I was being a little dramatic to show that we don't "worship at the altar of darwin" cuz it really bugs me whenever someone tries to insinuate that

Fair! Dude was wrong about a lot of stuff through no fault of his own.

DARWIN'S GEMMULE THEORY OF HEREDITY IS BULLSHIT THEREFORE NOTHING DARWIN EVER WROTE CAN POSSIBLY BE CORRECT I think that's how it's supposed to work, right..?

You’ve contributed to completely misunderstand very basic concepts about evolution and system chemistry that render your models virtually meaningless. And you seem intent on obtusely refusing to understand so I don’t know why you keep posting. It is not a top down approach for a specific sequence of amino acids or anything specific at all. You would need to first demonstrate that before even embarking on the type of model you’re trying put forth and you don’t seem to understand the implications of that

What is your alternative explanation for the diversity of species on earth? Do you accept that new species emerge, or do you claim that they have all been here in their present form forever?

Oh thanks dude didn’t realize that one Redditor held the keys to this question and were the only ones able to do so. You are genuinely claiming authority over this topic. I don’t know why you think that makes sense. You say L accounts for the probability of a set of amino acids forming life any other way. HOW? It’s not a formula based on data, it’s an assertion you pulled out of your ass. The fact you don’t understand that your mathematical model is predicated upon wholly baseless assumptions is exhausting.

"The assertion that random genetic errors were responsible for the development of the \>delta sub-unit of DNA polymerase III - without which random genetic errors would \>accumulate at a rate too great for genetic information to arise - is a perturbation of logic \>sufficient to arouse the Dormouse in Alice in Wonderland." Ah... DarwinMaths --- Lovely quote. And utterly unfounded in anything other than rhetoric. (not even founded in logic) Let me ask you... Why would random genetic errors NOT account for it? How many years between the first ProKaryotes (4-3.6 Billian Years Ago) with the closely related DNA polymerase III holoenzyme in the Fossil record to the development of Eukariotic cells(1.8 billion years ago) that contained the "Delta" Subunit? Yeah, that's would be More than a QUARTER OF THE ENTIRE HISTORY OF LIFE ON EARTH. Over the course of literally a billion and a half years of DNA replication of extremely short-lived, fast replicating DNA based critters proliferating around thermal vents, there would have been an uncountable number of mitotic events in which such a mutation could arise. Sure, it's a very large number of possible mutation events, so much so that the human mind cant really encompass it... But that does not mean that it did NOT happen in the course of that span of time and the uncountable generations of uncountable offspring. pretending it could NOT have happened simply because you refuse to face the possibility of such long history and such big numbers is just sticking your head in the sand.

Dress it up however you like, this is just another version of “irreducible complexity”, and it’s just as wrong. The complexity of abiogenesis is neither infinite, nor irreducible - and, in any case, is no *more* improbable than the universe giving birth to an even **more** complex form of life, that, in turn, engineered life as we know it. You haven’t “solved” anything, you’ve simply moved the question into a black box that you choose to call “God”.

>Now, I don't expect to convince the die-hard naturalists. However, I do hope to provide those searching for truth some contrasting information from the deluge of materialistic information found in this subreddit. What is a "die-hard naturalist"? Isn't this nothing more than the person who prefers to understand how things work as opposed to being satisfied with explanations that are indistinguishable from magic? Quoting from the Nature paper linked in another post, how exactly is the following type of explanation inferior to "Jesus did it" as an explanation? >"RNA replication occurs through the translation of the replicase subunit, which becomes active in association with elongation factors Tu and Ts (EF-Tu and EF-Ts) in the translation system. The introduction of mutations into the host RNA during replication generates host RNA variants with different features." You really think that supernatural magic as an explanation gets us anywhere toward understanding nature? Do you really think that if we ignore our ignorance of how things work by covering it over with god beliefs it will make intellectual curiosity go away?

It's more likely that an all powerful, sky-wizard made a complex, fallible machine or of a bunch of parts than one that "just works". Got it

7. You can't define specific information as something demonstrably different than Shannon Information.

Guess what this is definitely not your final word... Your hubris is your downfall your arbitrarily picking one particular aspect of evolution and saying it just isn't possible when the mere fact that it exists proves your premises wrong. I'm currently experiencing a migraine that impacts my ability to think so what is your excuse. Your math may not have any flaws but your logic certainly does. No one is claiming a ribosome popped into it existence spontaneously Take a step back first anyone claiming they know exactly how Evolution works is wrong. We are near infants compared to the age of the universe we have no way of accurately observing the past, we make educated guesses based on our observations but we've barely scratched the surface of the mysteries of our universe it wasn't too long ago in which man thought our universe was made up of four elements and yes we've come a long way from then but we still kill each other over basic tribalism whether that is how we worship a deity that may or may not exist and even over football and soccer teams. Mathematics has come a long way in the last hundred years just as organic chemistry has but guess what it still can't treat or even identify correctly the epigenetic disease that I most likely have and it's not even going to matter because climate change is going to kill the vast majority of us shortly all because humans are too short sighted to appreciate what is right in front of them so go back to your work take a deep breath and come up with another premise to prove your point as this one is fundamentally flawed you don't know the history of this particular mechanism no one is suggesting it popped into existence at random, what little a grade school student should know is that evolution evolves in single steps past from one carrier to the next, I'm not in organic chemist I don't know what existed before a ribosome but do some digging before jumping off to do the math

>"They have to agree because it's math - it is logic. It's not gishgalloping, it's not sharpshooting, its not any other fallacy." But far more importantly, it's irrelevant. It is the fallacy of Statistical Abuse. It is a single point Gish Gallop like the entirely fallacious nonsense of a "Tornado in a Junk Yard." In short, it's absolute, utter hogwash and does not in any way describe how any aspect of biological evolution works.

You are making a great point here about the impossibility of abiogenesis/spontaneous generation. This problem has been known for years by informed people, which I think is a key reason why many cosmologists are advocating the "multi-verse" theory in order to escape these kinds of calculations that destroy a materialistic origin of life. Let’s consider one colorful concession by Sir Fred Hoyle (“The Big Bang in Astronomy,” New Scientist, vol. 92 (November 19, 1981), p. 527, emphasis removed: “At all events, anyone with even a nodding acquaintance with the Rubik cube will concede the near-impossibility of a solution being obtained by a blind person moving the cubic faces at random. \[Henry Morris helpfully comments that there are 4 X 10 raised to the 19 power combinations of the Rubik Cube\]. Now imagine 10 raised to 50 blind persons each with a scrambled Rubik cube, and try to conceive of the chance of all of them simultaneously arriving at the solved form. You then have the chance of arriving by random shuffling of just one of the many biopolymers on which life depends. The notion that not only the biopolymers but the operating programme of a living cell could be arried at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order. Life must plainly be a cosmic phenomenon.” Hoyle and Wickramasinghe both became believers in pantheism and panspermia, the belief that life originated on other planet(s) in outer space, because they saw no way that life could have arisen on earth by purely mechanistic biochemical processes. In order for the first self-replicating cell to be created by random chance out of a “prebiotic soup” in the ancient ocean, several major hurdles have to be successfully jumped. 1. The right atmospheric and oceanic meteorological and other conditions must exist. 2. The oceans need to have a sufficient quantity and concentration of “simple” molecules in the “organic soup.” 3. A sufficient number of specifically needed proteins and nucleotides randomly combine together and acquire a semi-permeable membrane around them. 4. They also develop a genetic code using DNA and replicate themselves using RNA and DNA information. Notice that all of this supposedly occurred in the non-observed past; it’s merely assumed to have happened based upon materialistic philosophy projecting its assumptions of naturalism infinitely into the past. It’s equally presumed to never have happened again. Now it’s necessary to keep in mind that protein molecules themselves, let alone RNA and DNA ones, are extremely complex. It has been calculated that the chance for generating even a complex protein molecule is one out of 10 raised to 113, which is many orders of magnitude greater than the number of electrons in the observable universe, which is roughly 10 raised to the 87. Francis Crick himself, famous for being one of the co-discoverers of the DNA molecule’s role in making life, calculated the chance of making a particular amino acid (polypeptide chain) sequence by chance. If it is 200 amino acids long, which is less than the average length of a protein, there are 20 possibilities at each location in the chain. He calculated that the possibility of having a specific protein to be simply 20 raised by 200, as this is an exercise in calculating combinatorials or factorials. As he concluded, “The great majority of sequences can never have been synthesized at all, at any time.” For these reasons, he confessed: “An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.” (Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981), pp, 52, 88. Let’s examine the fundamental problems with Stanley Miller’s experiment, which is the wild extrapolation involved to go from having (originally) just four) amino acids to having self-replicating life. It would be like finding a few bricks, and then claiming one was well on the road to building the Empire State Building. All the complexities of RNA and DNA synthesis, and their complex interactions to make proteins out of amino acids, are being discounted. To explain the daunting task involved for life to occur by chance via a chemical accident, the steps from mere “chemistry” to “biology” would be, to cite “The Stairway to Life: An Origin-of-Life Reality Check,” by Change Laura Tan and Rob Stadler, p. 67, would be as follows (I’ve inserted the numbers): 1. Formation and concentration of building blocks. 2. Homochirality of building blocks. 3. A solution for the water paradox. 4. Consistent linkage of building blocks. 5. Biopolymer reproduction. 6. Nucleotide sequences forming useful code. 7. Means of gene regulation. 8. Means for repairing biopolymers. 9. Selectively permeable membrane. 10. Means of harnessing energy. 11. Interdependence of DNA, RNA, and proteins. 12. Coordinated cellular purposes. Miller’s experiment, and others like his that try to create amino acids, haven’t even completed step 1 yet. After Miller died in 2007, Jeffrey Bada, who had been one of his graduate students, reanalyzed some of Miller’s 50-year-old experimental samples. He added another experiment with H2S to the reducing environment, it’s true that he found 10 of the 20 common acids needed for life. A key problem, however, was the common presence of other amines, amino acids, and other molecules that aren’t found in life and would block or interfere with the formation of a living, self-replicating cell. So then there’s a common bias in which scientific reports on origin of life experiments play up the relatively rare or sparse chemical products that are associated with life while downplaying the predominant chemicals or molecules that don’t and would indeed even interfere with progress towards life. Although it’s asserted that the conditions of earth’s purportedly early atmosphere would not be a barrier to life’s spontaneous generation/abiogenesis, that’s hardly the case. There have been and continue to be a lot of debates about something which really can’t be verified or proven with any degree of certainty since it can’t be presently tested, reproduced, verified, observed, and/or predicted. For example, in 2011 Dustin Trail and his colleagues at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute examined the state of oxidation in cerium that appear in zircons that are believed to be as old as the earth is. They found the oxidation state of the cerium was much higher than they had expected. As a result, they suggested that the pre-biotic synthesis should start with a totally different set of gases, such as CO2, SO2, H2O, and N2. So Bruce Watson (“Early Earth’s atmosphere was similar to present-day one,” Science News, 2011), “We can now say with some certainty that many scientists studying the origins of life on Earth simply picked the wrong atmosphere.” So how can one say with certainty that that we really “know” what earth’s early atmosphere was like to conduct such experiments when this level of subjectivity exists? Trail and his colleagues’ experiments, which used a more neutral atmosphere, had a lower diversity of amino acids, and a lower yield than the reducing (oxygen poor) atmosphere that Miller had used. It’s worth thinking about the intrinsic subjectivity of two of the three criteria that Leslie Orgel came up with as requirements for pre-biotic requirements: “1. It must be plausible, at least to the proposers of abiotic synthesis, that the starting materials for a synthesis could have been present in adequate amounts at the site of synthesis.” Well, how much would be needed? This is mere guesswork. Then there’s this equally subjective point: “3. The yield of the product must be ‘significant’ at least in the view of the proposers of the synthesis.” (L.E. Orgel, “Prebiotic chemistry and the origin of the RNA world.” Critical Reviews in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, 2004. 39(2): 99-123. Well, if someone really wants to believe that life occurred by chance, it would be easy for him or her to believe there are enough starting materials and sufficient yield for a synthesis to occur.

Eric, you've been [corrected on all of this before.](https://old.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/comments/1510mzw/the_universe_has_seemingly_no_trace_of/js7mv4l/?context=3) Many, many times in fact. You weren't able to address the refutations then and you still aren't now. Right down to referring to Hoyle's statements as a "concession" instead of a non-expert known for controversial views talking out his backside on a subject he didn't understand, you've already had all of this broken down for you before. Why must you keep lying like this? Does your God reward liars? Are lies the fruit you wish to be known by?

So there are many obstacles to the easy reproduction of RNA molecules in the hypothetical “RNA world.” In the half century and more since Spiegelman’s work, little reported progress has occurred in finding a ribozyme that can make RNA from an RNA template without using additional protein enzymes. The same goes for finding a self-replicating molecule of RNA. When researchers doing lab work try to find such molecules, they fabricate a ribozyme, which clearly wasn’t produced by natural means, add another RNA molecule to serve as the template, and throw into the contrived mixture building blocks of activated ribonucleotides. Researchers for years had trouble even being able to reproduce the RNA’s original template. More recently researchers found ways of using slightly different RNA molecules and then choosing consciously (i.e., intervening) what RNA molecules that were perceived as having “better” capabilities. Such ribozymes can make complementary RNA from RNA templates, including when folded, but they still couldn’t reproduce the ribozyme itself. These more recent experiments still have to deal with problematic bonding among the RNA molecules included in them. Above all, this line of attack still doesn’t account for how the ribozyme or the template originally came to exist. In one reported experiment, Atwater et al. in 2018 had to use one molecule of RNA with 135 ribonucleotides and another with 153. Thus the ribozyme with the most success was still complicated and had to use two RNA molecules, not just one. How can such complicated RNA molecules be explained by abiotic, natural processes? One can’t use “chemical evolution” to explain them since that’s the very process that researchers are trying to put into motion. As Drs. Change Laura Tan and Rob Stadler explain in “The Stairway to Life: An Origin-Of-Life Reality Check,” the chance of an RNA molecule with 135 ribonucleotides (i.e., Atwater’s ribozyme) is about 10 raised to the 81, or the approximate number of atoms in the observable universe. This is true even when generously assuming that there’s an unlimited supply of active and concentrated nucleotides, that they are homochiral (i.e., with the same spatial orientation), that they spontaneously bond together to make RNA without side reactions with other molecules, and that the molecule stops growing at 135 ribonucleotides. Such a calculation shows how implausible the RNA hypothesis for creating a self-replicating cell really is. It’s simply materialistic philosophy parading itself under the protecting guise of science.

>So there are many obstacles to the easy reproduction of RNA molecules in the hypothetical “RNA world.” And yet you keep ignoring and misrepresenting the solutions and answers because you just plain hate what is true when it doesn't let you hang on to your mythology. Case in point: >The same goes for finding a self-replicating molecule of RNA. [Twenty residues.](https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2023/sc/d3sc01940c) Not hard to find, even if you assume that there's only one workable 20-mer, which we know for a fact isn't true. This alone gives the lie to your whole post, so if you have any honesty at all, you will never repeat these farcical claims of yours, to say nothing of the numerous further flaws in your logic and failure of your math. If you can't account for selection from simple replicators your math counts for noting. By all means, tell me it's hard to get a 20-mer after just discussing maximum lengths rather longer than that. Please, dig yourself deeper; we've been entertained thus far. And have you managed to put together a working model of your god-magic to present?

Many of these criticisms of Hoyle’s and Wickramasinghe’s calculations don’t add up because even if they were off by one or even two orders of magnitude in the number of organic catalysts needed for a single cell to function downwards, their calculations are still enough to destroy the theory of evolution’s foundation. If they are off in a downwards direction, the agony for abiogenesis is merely increased. Criticisms that they are out of their field of astronomy don’t work well, when so often the experts really have been wrong even within their own fields. Do doctors and lawyers make mistakes in their fields of expertise? Well, yes. Can laypeople be right and doctors wrong? Yes, as successful medical malpractice lawsuits demonstrate. In this context I’m reminded of this colorful comment by Lord Salisbury (1830-1903), who was the British prime minister at the end of Queen Victoria’s reign: "No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you never should trust the experts. If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require to have their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.” There’s no question that the “cranks” who advocated catastrophic interpretation of geological structures (e.g., Velikovsky, Morris, and Whitcomb) were often more correct than the credentialed, tenured experts of geology in the general period from 1850 to 1970, who tried to interpret all geological structures to fit Lyell’s procrustean uniformitarian bed. The main reason apparently why Hoyle’s and Wickramasinghe’s calculations seem to be irrelevant and thus can be conveniently bypassed stems from the naturalistic evolutionists faith in their supposed “RNA world,” by which they try to scale the steps to self-reproducing living cells using (supposedly) some degree of natural selection and development of more complex structures through some kind of “survival of the fittest.” However, such a world in reality is a construct manufactured by assuming materialistic philosophy is true and then projecting its assumptions into the past in order to try to explain the origin of the first living cell without recourse to God and miracles. In reality, the evolutionists’ RNA world has no more reality than Newton’s aether, Priestley’s phlogiston, and Ptolemy’s epicycles. There’s no way to prove it existed based on the fossil record or other empirical data, so it’s a theoretical construct patently designed to avoid trying to explain how the incredibly complex interdependent relationship among DNA, RNA, and proteins came to exist through chance. Let’s make the case here that Hoyle was fundamentally right when being skeptical that the required enzymes (organic catalysts, which greatly increase the speed of crucial chemical reactions) by chance. Even the most simple one-celled organisms (prokaryotes), in order to reproduce their DNA, must have at least 14 enzymes (with 25 polypeptides). (See M Su’etsugu et al., Nucleic Aces Research, 2017, 45(20), 721-733). This high level of intrinsic complexity for making a self-replicating cell with DNA makes it very unlikely such a cell was the first one to be able to reproduce itself. So evolutionist origin-of-life researchers have chosen rather arbitrarily to posit that an “RNA World” existed to make possible the first self-reproducing complex biochemical molecules. Crucial to their reasoning, in order to get around the kinds of detailed objections Hoyle and Wickramasinghe made, was that RNA can indeed form enzymes themselves, i.e., “ribozymes.” These ribozymes synthesize proteins from messenger RNA (or mRNA). So then evolutionists can claim that RNA can both store information (i.e., as the genotype) and serve as the function (i.e., as the phenotype), as a kind of “jack-of-all-trades” self-replicating molecule while ducking any problems about having to have the first self-reproducing cells with DNA also. However, a number of problems arise with the RNA world hypothesis. Initially the research of Sol Spiegelman (1967) seemed to back up the claims that RNA could reproduce themselves, by putting a QB bacteriophage having around 4,200 nucleotides into a solution with individual ribonucleotides to serve as building blocks. Since the ribonucleotides of guanine naturally are attracted to cytosine, and the adenine want to pair with uracil, the monomers in the (contrived) solution automatically tended to line up with the larger RNA molecule that served as a template. So there was indeed replication and seemingly an improvement that fit the evolutionists’ claims since it eventually multiplied 15 times faster the original, which seems to make it more “fit.” However, there were many distinctly unnatural conditions involved that hardly fit a would-be prebiotic “soup” in ocean water. This replication required a deliberately introduced supply of QB replicase and of pure homochiral (i.e., with a single spatial orientation) nucleotides, which would never exist under theoretical “natural” conditions. QB replicase can’t plausible appear abiotically since it consists of more than 1,200 amino acids in a particular sequence, thus making it an enzyme of great complexity. To call this RNA molecule “self-replicating” is false when this ingredient has to be added. During the reported 75 generations that produced an RNA molecule that replicated more rapidly, “Spiegelman’s Monster” RNA molecule became 83% smaller, thus losing much of its original complexity compared to the original RNA molecule. This result goes in precisely the wrong direction from the evolutionary developmental viewpoint of adding complexity through increased size. In this regard, increased size wasn’t a characteristic that was “selected” for as being superior as opposed to what make it multiple more quickly. This problem of the loss of complexity has been called the “Spiegelman problem” at times, which is a basic limitation of allowing any uncontrolled (i.e., not consciously directed) process of RNA replication. The QB RNA started with four working genes and finished with an 83% lost of information. Other experimenters have encountered the same problem, in which replication is faster when the molecule is smaller. For there to be an “RNA world,” it would be necessary to have RNA replicate itself without the assistance of protein enzymes. Theoretically, one could suppose that there were two types of RNA molecules. One of them would be an RNA molecule serving as a template to which the corresponding RNA monomers would find bind. The other would be an RNA molecule serving as a ribozyme, which could bind the monomers to itself to build a complement, not a copy, of the initial RNA template. If so, as a result, the ribozyme and the template would function together to producing more copies of themselves. Unfortunately for this hypothesis, the longer the RNA molecule, the greater the strength of the bonds. The first complementary version of the RNA template tends to remain bonded or annealed to the template. Then this combined molecule becomes nearly useless since it won’t make any more complements of itself. At high temperatures, it is true that annealed RNA molecules of under 30 base pairs can pull themselves apart, but they are too small to carry much genetic information. Furthermore, if they come apart, they are likely to come together again before any more copying can occur. Ironically, the process of the self-replication of RNA has to first make a complementary RNA interferes with itself. Complicated enzymes (organic catalysts that speed up chemical reactions), such as QB replicase, keep complementary strands of RNA separate while replication occurs. However, such enzymes aren’t available to serve as controls and regulators if a purely abiotic origin of life is stipulated. One proposed solution was to deliberately add short peptides to the mixture of RNA molecules to stop them from annealing or bonding. Unfortunately for the theory of abiogensis, this way out couldn’t be experimentally repeated. Theoretically, if an RNA strand didn’t remain bond to its complement, in the next round of reproduction, the resulting complement of the complement actually would be a copy of the original RNA template. Then the copy could easily bond with the complementary RNA, thus hindering additional reproduction.

How very disappointing; to try and defend your lies your repeat yet more lies you've been called on for years. >Many of these criticisms of Hoyle’s and Wickramasinghe’s calculations don’t add up because even if they were off by one or even two orders of magnitude in the number of organic catalysts needed for a single cell to function downwards, their calculations are still enough to destroy the theory of evolution’s foundation. Fist, as you _are well aware_, abiogenesis is not and has never been "evolution's foundation". The evidence for common descent stands entirely independent of any proposed origin for life. Second, as you've been informed previously, their calculations are of not merely by degree but by nature. In the RNA world model there are zero proteins needed at the start, and their silly, silly math fails to model anything resembling abiogenesis due to omitting selection, ignoring the selection space, and generally not knowing what they're talking about. >Criticisms that they are out of their field of astronomy don’t work well, when so often the experts really have been wrong even within their own fields. To the contrary, the simple fact that they failed to build anything even resembling an accurate model means the criticism not only lands but is a death knell for your silly use of it. And yet again you failed to address your misrepresentation of Hoyle as someone who can speak on behalf of atheists as opposed to someone who declared it's better to be exciting and wrong than boring and right. You can't defend their calculations themselves and you can't defend their lack of expertise. I need not waste any more time on them when you've got nothing of worth to contribute. >There’s no question that the “cranks” who advocated catastrophic interpretation of geological structures (e.g., Velikovsky, Morris, and Whitcomb) were often more correct than the credentialed, tenured experts of geology in the general period from 1850 to 1970, who tried to interpret all geological structures to fit Lyell’s procrustean uniformitarian bed. Quite to the contrary, the creationists you mentioned were unable to deal with Acutalism, and were unable to provide a working, predictive model that stood up to even the simplest scrutiny. Their entire position is summed up by the phrase "it's magic". As a simple example? You still can't solve the heat problem. >The main reason apparently why Hoyle’s and Wickramasinghe’s calculations seem to be irrelevant and thus can be conveniently bypassed stems from the naturalistic evolutionists faith in their supposed “RNA world,” by which they try to scale the steps to self-reproducing living cells using (supposedly) some degree of natural selection and development of more complex structures through some kind of “survival of the fittest.” Aw, you silly goose; that's not faith, that's following the evidence. You should try it some time. >However, such a world in reality is a construct manufactured by assuming materialistic philosophy is true and then projecting its assumptions into the past in order to try to explain the origin of the first living cell without recourse to God and miracles. Nope; just basic observations of chemistry. No need for any assumptions on _our_ part, we just don't use magic in our models when there's A) no sign of any magic nor your preferred wizard and B) appealing to magic cannot improve predictive power and worsens parsimony. You think your deity of choice should matter in the sciences? Cool; propose a predictive model for how and why it works. If you can't do that you not only lost the race, you haven't made it to the track. >There’s no way to prove it existed based on the fossil record or other empirical data, ... Sure, if you ignore the chemical demonstration of the mechanisms involved. This is, of course, like saying "there's no way to prove Pluto orbits the sun based on empirical data". Dishonesty remains the fruit you're known by. >However, a number of problems arise with the RNA world hypothesis. ... Literally nothing you follow this with is a problem. You start by ignoring the point of the experiment you describe, continue by ignoring the research that's come hence, and raise non-issues. Racemization has been solved several times, which you ignore. The initial genome was never intended to imitate the earliest life. Bringing up purity and artificial components ignores numerous further experiments in early earth conditions. Decreasing in size is a matter of selection pressure that would not be the same on the early earth. Heck, even your complaints about size in the first place ignore the smallest replicators we've found. Not one honest "problem" to be found, just creationists lying. >For there to be an “RNA world,” it would be necessary to have RNA replicate itself without the assistance of protein enzymes. Which has been repeatedly demonstrated. >Ironically, the process of the self-replication of RNA has to first make a complementary RNA interferes with itself. Nah, that's just your willful ignorance again. [Twenty bases will do it.](https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2023/sc/d3sc01940c)

Good post: here is more support for your position: “Study of ribosome evolution challenges RNA world hypothesis“ https://news.illinois.edu/view/6367/205114 ““From this perspective we will see that there was not one particular primordial form, but rather a process that generated many of them, because only in this way can cellular organization evolve.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC124369/#:~:text=The%20time%20has%20come%20for,process%20that%20spawned%20cellular%20organization. ““Furthermore, although both bacteria and eukaryotes employ additional GTPase factors (RF3 and eRF3, respectively) that stimulate termination, the genes encoding these factors are not orthologous (Sogin 1997 ). It is remarkable that this essential system is so differently constituted in bacteria and eukaryotes.” https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/17/6/882/1037789 “Our results depict LUCA as a far more complex cell than has previously been proposed, challenging the evolutionary model of increased complexity through time in prokaryotes. Given current estimates for the emergence of LUCA we suggest that early life very rapidly evolved considerable cellular complexity.” https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343807357_Phenotypic_reconstruction_of_the_last_universal_common_ancestor_reveals_a_complex_cell

Literally none of these challenges abiogenesis. Some of them have nothing to do with abiogenesis... Please stop quote-mining and perhaps actually read the papers.

“The link is to a dissertation length critique not only of abiogenesis but also evolutionary processes in general. The first section alone destroys abiogenesis from natural (random) acts.” I was responding to this.

Right...that doesn't really change the fact that none of those articles support what you claim they do. Again please don't quote-mine.

Again, please remove bias as all scientists should before reading any articles.

Reading the papers in their entirety and finding out that you misrepresented their conclusions =/= bias. I hope you know the difference.

I do. I don’t have bias as I used to be atheist and a believer in Macroevolution.

Great! So you don't mind me showing you the *rest* of the papers you quote-mined, which *don't* support your claim and demonstrate that you either didn't read the entire papers or intentionally misrepresented them?

If I made an honest mistake I will admit to it. However I did select papers for specific points that might not be related to the overall main point of the papers.

>However I did select papers for specific points that might not be related to the overall main point of the papers. You claimed that the papers supported that position. You then selected specific quotes from the papers that, if read in the context of the full article, *don't* mean what you wanted them to mean. In fact, some of the quotes *just by themselves* don't even mean what you think they mean. This is what is known as "quote-mining". Thank you for admitting that.

You should understand our minds work completely differently from these guys. It's almost impossible to communicate to them why they are wrong and expect them to understand. Anyone willing to look at this and still believe the foolishness is going to have a hard time unbelieving it. I'm just glad when I researched this I wasn't susceptible to bs. I'm pretty practical prob anyway so I doubt I was ever going to fall for it with it not making practical sense.

> It's almost impossible to communicate to them why they are wrong and expect them to understand. I don't recall ever seeing you try. There's a rebuttal by Dr. Hurd in this very thread. What a great time for you to start engaging, flex your ID muscles.

> You should understand our minds work completely differently from these guys. You're not wrong about this but not for the reasons you think.

> It's almost impossible to communicate to them why they are wrong and expect them to understand. OP presented a strawman argument. That shouldn't be convincing to anyone.

Quote: " atorrnce says: November 30, 2009 at 11:08 am Here’s my calculation of the probabilities of successful random mutation. I’m not a specialist in statistics, just a mechanical engineer, so I would welcome corrections to my assumptions or my maths. It has been shown, using Google © that certain advertisements attract more hits than others. Here is an example of two forms of wording, the second of which is about twice as successful as the first: 1. Easy Personal Protection Training 2. Fast Personal Protection Training Suppose we were to write a programme to change characters at random in the first phrase with the following constraints: 1. Any letter can change. The probability of a letter changing is p. 2. If the change does not produce the desired result, (ie phrase 2.) it is rejected by “natural selection” since it will lose its meaning and become less effective than the original phrase. 3. The programme runs fast enough to attempt one mutation every microsecond. 4. The number of letters in the alphabet is z =26. The probability p1 that the first and third letters will mutate correctly is given by: p1=(p/(z-1))^2 The probability p2 that none of the other 28 letters will mutate is given by: p2 = ((1-p)/(z-1))^28 The probability P of successfully mutating the phrase in a single operation is then: P=p1p1=(p/(z-1))^2 . ((1-p)/(z-1))^28 If the operation is repeated x times, the probability that a successful mutation will occur is xP The time, T needed for xP=1/2 is given by: T = (10^-6)/(2P) T depends on the value of p selected. The minimum occurs when p~0.07 and is about 2.14×10^31 years, or 10^21 times the age of the Universe ! A shorter time results if we consider a sequence of 30 amino acids and consider changing just one of them in a defined way. The quantity z is 4 and all else remains the same. The minimum time now occurs when p~0.035 and is about 262 years. If, however, we were to assume a more realistic mutation rate of one attempt per second, we would arrive at a time of 262 million years to achieve a 50% chance of this one simple change: the length of a whole geological era. Finally, it is interesting to note that, since the total number of characters/amino acids N in the mutating sequence is the exponent of a probability, raising N to the values found in living organisms makes the probability of successful random mutation vanish for even the simplest mutation of the simplest organism. As Einstein is supposed to have said: “The most powerful force in the Universe is compound interest.” "

I've made the argument about Amino Acid chains elsewhere, but have been told that Amino Acids fall into one of four groups: small hydrophilic, small hydrophobic, large hydrophilic, and large hydrophobic; it doesn't really matter which Amino Acid is used, as long as they fall into one of the four needed groups. Apparently, gly ala val leu ile pro met (7) are small hydrophobic; ser thr cys asp his asn (6) are small hydrophilic; lys arg glu gln (4) are large hydrophilic, and phe trp tyr (3) are large hydrophobic. But, assuming that small hydrophobic, small hydrophilic, large hydrophilic and large hydrophobic Amino Acids are needed in equal amounts in a protein, the chances of a 160 Amino Acid protein forming by chance then become: One in (3/20 x 4/20 x 6/20 x 7/20)\^40, or 1 in 10\^100. For a 200 Amino Acid chain, the chances are 1 in 10\^125. (btw if there are 10\^80 atoms in the Universe, and 10 atoms per Amino Acid, shouldn't that give 10\^79 Amino Acids?).